Press Release

A painting is a mirror of the natural world. Like an ecosystem, every element acts in relation to other elements, creating a unified whole. On canvas, this natural world takes the form of a garden, referring always beyond its enclosure. The garden is the site and symbol of our imagination. It is the breeding ground for our invention, where we harness the wild. Our mythologies make a utopia of the garden; our current environmental reality, a looming dystopia. These paintings imagine the future as a garden where artificial invention obeys the laws of an organism and the wild is tamed though reflection.As a painter, Fiona Ackerman is continually reinventing the way she represents her world, her environment and the places of her imagination. Exhibited across Canada and in Germany, her work is diverse in style and deeply rooted in the practice of painting. An ongoing exploration of artist studios as subject drew her away from abstraction and out of her Vancouver environment into the workspace of artists at home and abroad. Her current series explores ‘the garden’ as a site of symbolic invention. A larger series of these works will be exhibited at Winsor Gallery in November 2016.